Behind the Scenes: Prop Production
Hello, and welcome to our second developer blog, and the start of our behind the scenes updates. We released our first screenshot a short while ago and received a fantastic response, which was great. Following that we wanted to give you an insight into our unique design process.
We achieved our realistic looking characters through photographs of ourselves, for which we created by hand, masks, costumes and props. These characters are animated against a green screen, and we´ll have more on that in the near future.
To produce the characters we first required our distinctive masks, taking inspiration from Ancient Greek Theater, Venetian masks, and Impressionist art. We tried to marry up the characters personalities to distinctive facial features and colour schemes. To begin with we take a plain paper mache mask and begin to apply clay and plasticine, building up the masks, forming features and cutting away parts of our initial base.
When our design is completed we coat the masks in a epoxy resin to harden them, by this time they´re quite weighty and solid. Then comes the priming undercoat spray, and after that, the masks are painted by hand, each having a different colour both for differentiation in gameplay, and also to project elements of said characters traits.
The (almost) final product looks like this:
In addition we needed costumes for the characters, and quickly decided on monk-esque robes. After looking online and in stores for an appropriate garb and finding nothing, we decided to make our own, out of curtains (or drapes for our American friends).
After the drawing up of many drafts we finally chalked our design onto the
curtain, pinning it together, cutting it with scissors and putting it through a sewing machine.
The body was one tunic piece, and the sleeves and hood separate and later attached. We´re really happy with the finished product, and it´s just one of many costumes we´ll be producing from hereon out. Below you can see our process and the (almost) finished product.
Alongside the outfits and masks we´re also creating and adapting props to feature in the game, for example this ´ancient stone artifact´(below) is an alarm clock from the 80´s, sourced from a charity shop and spray painted with a gritty stone effect. We´re always keeping an eye out to find other such quirky objects to adapt and intergrate them into our game, and also intend to create our own from scratch going forward.
Hopefully you found this an interesting insight into our design process, which is one of the more unorthodox approaches to game graphics. We feel this combination of the real and the digital gives us a surreal yet crisp visual style that embodies the abstract and absurd nature of the setting the player finds themselves in within the world of Purgatory.
Thanks for reading, stay tuned for future updates on the content we´re creating, and further behind the scenes blogs on everything from animation to environment design. :)
